Is your Oil and Gas technology
competitive?


Dear Fellow Innovator,

You reached Flavio's blog
on CRAZYDATA.

Let's have a chat:

Grab a coffee

I am always happy to talk
with interesting people.

Some time ago I wanted to get a clearer understanding of:
who and how was really innovating in the Oil & Gas industry.

Industry 4.0, IoT, advanced Data Analytics are all very nice words, but who is really pushing the boundaries and what are the business models these new technological trajectories are enabling?

Well, "you can not discover new things using a mindset of the past"

so I decided to invest a small amount and ask my friends of ErreQuadro to help me.

Here is the results, and the approach I used.

If you want a hand to apply it for your company,
give me a call

Flavio


Diving the Patents Ocean:

The guys of Erre Quadro have assembled a very nice Cognitive Engine tool and a kind of A-team of PhDs, to use novel approaches like semantic databases, induction decision trees and clustering algorithms to dive into the World Patents archives in a very effective way and with powerful visualizations.
The job some dozens of analysts were only thinking to approach, is done by Erre Quadro in few days.
The result is quite nice insights that can let you have a clear picture of a vast and complex scenarios.

I use ErroQuadro to support me in at least 3 key phases of the business intelligence and strategic analysis of technological product and services:

  1. The set up of a "Discovery Expedition"
    into the Patents library to extract who, what and how has adopted or initiated a new technology
  2. The identification of evolutive trends
    in using technologies to address a Customer job-to-be-done. (Actually Erre Quadro mixes their analysis with their experience in the TRIZ methodology to tell you which possible future technologies will be adopted by the market players to respond to their (your) customers)
  3. The identification of Patent protection or Patent circumvention strategies
    in order to assure all your R&D and Commercial efforts are not invane or are capable to recover a gap

"NLP builds a bridge between documents that are not linked or referrable"

Oil & Gas latest technologies and their applications

Going back to my original question, here is the result of my quest to identify the most interesting Startups playing in the Oil & Gas industry, i.e. patenting novel ideas and tackling the market with new business models.

The analysis made by ErreQuadro has identified some 300 patents filed in the preceeding 10 years by startups and corporations world-wide.

From there it was easy for me to investigate the main technology used and applications:

7 key Oil & Gas applications identified:

I have identified 7 key applications for latest technologies in the Oil & Gas industry:

  1. Data Analytics
    any data manipulation that can enhance the informative content of a database
  2. Workflow automation
    allows to have the right information in the right place at the right time
  3. Predictive Analytics
    any data manipulation that allow to estimate future behaviors
  4. Know-how management
    the ability to make meaningful associations between information
  5. Image recognition
    the ability to make meaningful associations between images and information
  6. Automated decisions
    the ability to take decisions not previously coded
  7. Logs history certification
    the ability to certify the temporal sequence of events

11 key Oil & Gas technologies identified:

I have identified 10 key technologies used to abilitate the 7 applications.
7 of them can be immediatelly related to the 7 applications, while the remaining 4 are supporting technologies that help decouple physical media from digital information.
The first 7 technologies support the virtualization of the industry, while the other 4 support the robotization of the industry.

7 Virtualization technologies

  1. Cloud orchestration
    the ability to build cloud infrastructures capable to handle entire processes, not only tasks
  2. Robotic Process Automation
    the ability to interface Information systems simulating the human interaction instead of building APIs
  3. Semantic DataBases
    Databases that associate information based on their meaning, not on their labels
  4. Blockchain technology
    Software routines capable distribute the ownership of information beyond the reach of manipulators
  5. Machine Learning (supervised)
    Software routines capable to build rules based on past inputs and outputs, that minimize the error
  6. Machine Learning (unsupervised)
    Software routines capable see commonalities/exceptions on an input set
  7. Artificial Intelligence (reinforcement learning)
    Software routines capable to learn from iteration of inputs and outputs, to maximize the reward

4 Robotization technologies

  1. Augmented reality
    the ability to associate information to reality
  2. Virtual Reality
    the ability to build a sensorial interface to digital data frames
  3. Mobile IOT and Radio tagging
    Passive or low energy consumption devices that can be remotely interrogated
  4. Drones
    devices supporting the decoupling between inspectors and the inspected item

How these Technologies help solve Oil & Gas industry problems:

The main problems solved by these technologies are:

  1. Sales maximization
    enabling simulations and scenario planning
  2. Opex minimization
    mainly in production maximization and maintenance costs reduction
  3. Capex optimization
    asset management, people tracking and quality certifications
  4. Risks reduction
    through surveilance, monitoring and inspections.

Oil & Gas technologies at your fingertip

This short analysis has allowed me to have a clear panorama of the key technological trends, their applications, key players, geographical and industrial adoption.
It didn't take more than a few days, and a very limited budget, but it's result were painting a quite interesting scenario.

So interesting that has been presented to the annual ANIMP ( Italian industrial plants supply chain association ) Congress in 2017.

If you want to know more about its key players or expand it for your specific needs,
give me a call.


Want to know more? Get in touch:

Flavio

Contact me